I was told, too, that God was good, and that He knew what was best for me, and best for everybody.

This was less satisfactory than the first statement; because it came, point blank, against all my{70} notions of goodness.
It was not good to let old master cut the flesh off Esther, and make her cry so.

Besides, how did people know that God made black people to be slaves?
Did they go up in the sky and learn it?
or, did He come down and tell them so?
All was dark here.

It was some relief to my hard notions of the goodness of God, that, although he made white men to be slaveholders, he did not make them to be _bad_ slaveholders, and that, in due time, he would punish the bad slaveholders; that he would, when they died, send them to the bad place, where they would be "burnt up." Nevertheless, I could not reconcile the relation of slavery with my crude notions of goodness.
Then, too, I found that there were puzzling exceptions to this theory of slavery on both sides, and in the middle.

I knew of blacks who were _not_ slaves; I knew of whites who were _not_ slaveholders; and I knew of persons who were _nearly_ white, who were slaves.